The billion-dollar case for sustaining palaeontology’s digital databases

Journal article

The digital revolution has transformed palaeontology through the development of openly accessible, community-driven databases that underpin some of the most complex and large-scale empirical studies of the history of life on Earth. These systems safeguard high-effort, volunteered data and have revealed major macroevolutionary patterns, including the 'Big 5' mass extinctions. These efforts also represent remarkable global scientific and financial investment, which is continually required to support the next generation of databases and associated research. Here we conducted a survey of 118 palaeontological and allied Earth science databases, analysing their diversity dynamics, including origination and extinction rates. We show that approximately 85% of all community-curated databases have lifespans of less than 15 years, putting decades of investment at risk. We show that database creation effort has increased in the past 30 years, with peaks in database loss related to 5-year funding cycles. We advocate for strategies to enhance database longevity, including sustained funding models, stronger institutional support and modular backend architectures that better link international community databases to each other and to fossil specimens.

Authors: Dowding, EM; Dunne, EM; Collins, KS; Cryer, K; De Baets, K

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Nature Research
• Journal: Nature Ecology & Evolution
• Publication date: 2026-02-10
• Acceptance date: 2026-01-13
• DOI: 10.1038/s41559-026-02985-8
• EISSN: 2397-334X
• ISSN: 2397-334X
• Language: English
• Keywords: Distributed database; Diversity (politics); Digital preservation; Modular design; Safeguard; Origination; Investment (military)